All things, however minute, have their origin; and these fragments, now dedicated to you without your knowledge or permission, were in genesis both hazardous and humble. They were born in a rolltop desk. In 1918, as you know I was working on the Philadelphia Evening Ledger —where I had charge of a column whose most genuine source of pride was that it first gave printers’ ink to some of your prose butterflies now framed and mounted as Mere Trivia. At that time I used to write what I call Synthetic Poems, which began as a mild burlesque of the vers libre epidemic. But I also had a feeling that free verse, then mainly employed as the vehicle as a rather gaudy impression of mere eccentricity, might prove a viable medium for humorous, ironic and satiric brevities. I experimented by including a few of the Synthetic Poems in a book which was in general of quite a different kind. (To gratify the publisher I will mention its title, The Rocking Horse.) I must admit that no one noticed them.

About the same time there arose an access of interest in oriental poem-forms. You yourself sent me from London a volume of Arthur Waley’s delightful Chinese translations. Miss

viii

Amy Lowell and others were busy with Japa-nese Echoes. To paraphrase the old English song, it was “Loud sing Hokku” all across the map. So instead of Synthetic Poems I began to call my broodings Translations from the Chinese; and, for some unknown reason, printed them over the bogus signature of “John Cavendish.” To my surprise and even to my embarrassment, letters soon arrived from earnest literates. Who was John Cavendish? they asked. What about these Translations? they exclaimed. Where can one learn more about Chinese poetry? And they enclosed stamped addressed envelopes. Once more was expressed the beautiful human faculty for tak-ing seriously whatever appears in print. I went ahead, conscientiously, to satisfy the de-mand. In a little book (again I catch the publishers eye) called Hide and Seek I included a large section of Chinese translations, with biographical notes upon the Oriental authors—

done in such a vein that not even the gravest follower of the spurious Cavendish could mis-take the intention.

But there is a gist of this unimportant mat-ter. Little by little my Chinese sages began to coalesce and assume a voice of their own. I became not their creator but their stenographer. I began to feel a certain respect and affection for the “Old Mandarin” who was dimly emerg-ing as their Oriental spokesman. I began to realize that the mind speaks many languages, and some of its sudden intuitions and exclama-tions are truly as enigmatic to us as Chinese writing. We all like to imagine that some-

ix

where, in some far-away Orient of our spirit, there is a philosophy and a way (as Lao-Tse would say) that views with smiling bland com-posure the sad antics of men under the pressure of conflicting desires. In all hearts there is this lurking minified Mandarin whose mockery is more potent because it is serene and hopeless. My own particular Mandarin was born, as I say, in a rolltop desk; by which I mean in a newspaper office. It’s a favorable place for such cheerfully wistful wraiths to arise, for nowhere so insistently as in a newspaper office does one necessarily scrutinize the gallant frenzy of the race.

So my Mandarin gradually became a very real Familiar, and sometimes I see him peering out of a pigeon-hole, mocking me in his suave fashion. The odd thing is that his scoffing fre-quently changes into moods of pity or ecstacy that are even more disconcerting. In spite of his great age and his disillusion, he has mo-ments that are truly boyish. We all like to say, of a man we admire greatly, that he “has the heart of a child.” Certainly there is a naif appealing youthfulness in some of my Man-darins simplicities. Occasionally, late in a winter afternoon, when I have been (after a whole day of random interruptions) trying to get a few hurried paragraphs written for the newspaper, I have quietly become aware of him standing by the window at my elbow. He looks out at the astounding vista of great buildings, terraced in golden tiers, one above another into the transparent dusk. “Why don’t you get some of that into your writing?”

x

he says to me, waving his hand toward the view. But I don’t have leisure to answer him, for that is the time when I am hurrying to catch the 5:27 train.

Of course he can be very annoying. It is maddening to hear him contradict and ridicule the compromises and precious makeshifts which we build for self-respect. I tell him that he is an irresponsible doctrine: he has never had to earn a living, to carry on a daily job, or concern himself with anything but pure ration-alism. Also, he has the foreigner’s awkward way of taking our idiom literally. I said to him once, trying to explain a dilema in which I found myself, “I am between the Devil and the Deep Sea.” He smiled that provoking, sallow, tilt eyed smile of his. “Surely your choice is easy,” he said, “for you pretend to be fond of the Sea.” I have tried, in this small book, to translate more or less accurately some of his disturbing comments; but there are many more that I have not been able to render in-telligible. His dialect is often of a sort not found in the glossaries within my reach; and his principles of judgement are so opposite to those on which most of us establish our daily conduct that, as I have told him, I should need a contradictionary to interpret him properly.

So I may, here and there, have made him responsible for sentiments and implications that are my own rather than his. I wish I could tell you how strangely wise and happy he seems, in those rare moments when I am able to give ear to him. In spite of his skepticisms, he apparently sees so much more meaning in

xi

the human panorama than most of us do. And he has the queerest illusions. I have seen him throw down a newspaper in distress because, as he said, he found no word of Beauty in it. And when I explained to him, patiently, that that particular newspaper was not published with any such intention, he said, “Then, why publish it at all?”

Some of my friends, to whom I have talked about this unsettling phantom, have com-plained that he is really to elderly to be a really helpful companion; that his policies were formed under a Bad Old Dynasty; that he is too flippant and volatile to be congenial to Young Intellectuals in whom unorthodoxy has become severe, surly, and compulsory. But I am not one of those that believe that because a man is elderly that he is necessarily shallow. Everyone doubtless considers himself to be wiser, riper, more tolerant, now, than he was one year, five years, ten years ago. And if we think that to be so of ourselves, why may we not credit it as a fact in others? When I meet and talk with some of the youngest and most scathing of the rising Intellectuals, I amuse myself by imagining them as they will be say, thirty years hence. As I listen politely, I can see their faces change and wither. Those can-did young foreheads a little corrugated; those jovial thunderbolts of opinion a little less de-tonative in effect; those busy superlatives grown a trifle grizzled with service. No—I have known so many older heads who really are wiser and wittier than ourselves that I cannot help concluding Time may be a tonic

xii

rather than a sedative. And so I sincerely elect to Stand Up for the Senior Generation. (And then also, when I myself an a Senior, perhaps the Grandchildren will Stand Up for me.)

I don’t know just why I should be saying all this to you, dear Pearsall Smith—except that you seem to have been singularly skillful into carrying on into what one may without offence call Maturity the very spirit and virtue of Youth. I take it that you were perhaps a little elderly in your twenties, which makes you adorably sprightly in your fifties; so much so that you have served in many ways as the per-fect Ambassador from the Men of the Nineties to the Men of the Teens. In you we see how the irreverent humor and hilarious gusto we associate with youth may not merely perdure unabated into the rich urbanity of Middle Age: nay, that they are increased and quick-ened. Uncanonical as it may seem, Youth is the time to be docile and acceptive; not until the Fifth Decade has the mind any real right to begin laughing. Skepticism is meaningless until it emerges from a complete and experi-enced knowledge of all possible beliefs. Long-fellow (I can hear some of my contemporaries titter)—Longfellow wrote an admirable po-tent little satire in his rhymed description of “What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist.” For that is exactly what the hearts of healthy-minded young men do say, and should say. It is a delicious picture of that heavenly earnestness of adolescence. The skepticism of sophomores is only an extroverted form of the same too easy credulity. No

xiii

Young Revolutionist is dangerous: it is the Elderly Revolutionist who really makes things revolve. In the young, skepticism is mere biology and demiurge: in the mature it is in-tellectual. And as for matters of theology (in which you have betrayed much acute interest), the study of divinity is usually placed at the wrong end of life. Surely no man should be allowed unanswerably to pulpiteer the Future Life until he himself is near enough to it to make it a reality to his spirit. But if parsons must be ordained in youth, then they should begin as Bishops, and work downward to the really vital office of curate. For the Bishop is respectfully harkened to for his dignity and his scarlet hood; but the curate is listened to (if at all) only for what he says.

It seems too bad, I suddenly realize, to make you the victim of this grotesquely irrelevant pronouncement. But it must stand as your misfortune, since you who write so exquisitely and think with such delicate humorous honesty have shown yourself unwittingly as the ideal liaison officer between the generations. Those who would try absurdly to persuade us that there is some deep seated and inevitable hos-tility between the Young Men and their Elders can never stir up more than a sham battle while we see you pacing pensively between the op-posing trenches. After all, the one paramount virtue, not peculiar to any age, is sincerity.

Which of course suggests the delicious prob-lem as to how far a man may be insincere quite innocently and unconsciously. That indeed is too perilous to discuss. But truly I sometimes

xiv

wonder if some of the embattles youths of the Younger Set, who so fiercely defy and reject the wiles of the Foundering Fathers, have ever really seen or known an Older Man? More-over one is tempted to think that those who are so certain that the Intellect and everything really interesting began about the year 1919 are insecurely rooted in the great soil of life itself. Considering that every essential joy and agony of the human spirit was already Old Stuff when Lucretius wrote, that view seems to show a disrespect to Life itself—a serious disability in any artist.

Alas, I have now far overshot my mark, and after these heroics I fear my darling Old Mandarin will seem rather tame. You your-self, dear Pearsall Smith, with your keen ex-cisive sense, could have intimated all this in one glittering page.

Whom he discovered throwing per-fectly good food into the garbage pail, e. g., remnants of lotus salad, pickled snails, and fragments of birds’ nests which might have been made into nourishing soup.

TRANSFIXED with anguish

(O Daughter of Inequity)

I stood when I saw the sarcastic

moonlight

Gild the contents of your

Unthrifty garbage can.

O wasteful and slack minded offspring

Of cheese-witted peasantry,

Fallen in evil ways

While in service to the Peking profi-

teers,

When half the world is starving

You would toss away

A practicable mouse-patty

Or an undamaged rice-cake—

When you die

And your miserable wraith

Approached the Pagoda of the Immor-

tals

54

May even that lean and grissly portion

of your spirit

Which is worth saving

Be tossed without hesitation

Into the pergatorial incinerator.

55

CONTRADICTION

I SAW a man about to write a poem:

He trod ruthlessly down a subway

car,

Leaving behind him, left and right.

Macerated corns

And anguished faces.

Twenty minutes later

He wrote a lyric

Of exquisite tenderness.

56

EXEMPT

IN a subway car

I saw a girl

reading the New Re-

public.

Her long dark lashes

Were bent above an article

Called “The Surplus Woman”

She was temptingly beautiful

And she smiled upon the text

With gentle assurance and security.

57

MEDITATIONS ON POETRY

POETS seem to be much in demand.

Drawing room evenings, women’s

club meetings,

Literary luncheons, Chamber of Com-

merce dinners,

Wherever two or three sandwiches are

gathered together

There is always a poet

Exchanging his “message”

For an equivalent bulk

Of chow mein

And jellied sharks’ fins.

All of this is proof

Of a widespread hunger,

And not merely on the part of the poet.

58

A PRAGMATIST

THE American poet Lindsay

(A mercurial fellow)

Began his career

By codifying the ways in which the poet

Can get a free meal.

Here was a seer!

Here was a man with a strong grasp of

essentials!

59

A HAPPY LIFE

THE American poet Whitman

Did little to assist the razor

industry,

But he erected a plausible philosophy

Of indolence

Which, without soft concealments,

He called Loafing,

This so irritated the American people

(Who were busy putting up buildings

And tearing them down again)

That they never forgave him.

He was deficient in humor,

But he had a good time.

60

A NATIONAL FRAILTY

THE American people

Were put into the world

To assist Foreign lecturers.

When I visited them

They filled the crowded halls

To hear me tell the Great Truths

Which they might as well have read

In their own prophet Thoreau.

They paid me, for this,

Three hundred dollars a night,

And ten of their mandarins

Invited me to visit at Newport.

My agent told me

If I would wear Chinese costume on the

platform

It would be five hundred.

61

THE MAN WITH THE RAKE

IT is queer to think that many people

Have never raked leaves.

On a brilliant Sunday morning in

October

I admired trees as ruddy as burnt or-

ange,

The sauterne of the leaves, I said to

myself,

Raking placidly

And enjoying the crisp rustle.

That is what I like about raking

leaves—

it is wine and opiate for the mind:

The incessant skirmish of the wit is

calmed,

And as you rake and burn

And dodge, with smarting eyes,

The pungent, veering reek,

You fall into a dull easy muse,

And think to yourself,

After all, what is writing books

But raking leaves?

And at such times

I plant the seeds of poems.

it takes poems a long time to grow—

62

They lie germinating in the dark of the

mind;

But next spring, very likely,

There may emerge the green and tender

shoots

Of two or three bright stanzas.

63

VERITAS VOS DAMNABIT

IT is the Mark of extreme youth

To believe that telling the Whole

Trust

Is always useful.

Truth is not a diet

But a condiment.

64

ANOTHER POSTPONEMENT

ONCE, on a midnight of rain and

gale,

When the windowsrattled in

The hollow darkness,

I was in the kitchen

Eating cold turkey and cranberry sauce

Frisked from the icebox.

My mind was clear and busy:

Then, I suppose, I came as near as I ever

shall

To being ready to write a great

poem. . . .

But I lay down on my couch to meditate

And was soon fast asleep.

65

ADVANTAGE OF A BOOKISH

UPBRINGING

WHEN the wine has done its rosy

deed

(As the reputable English

Poet said)

I enjoy to study in tranquility

the lovable absurdities of men.

And then my familiarity with litera-

ures

Beasteads me well,

Affording me always a scholarly expla-

nation

For conduct seemingly eccentric.

Once, I remember,

After an evening in which Chancellor

Mu Kow and myself

Had repeatedly toasted toe loveliness

of the moon,

Condoling our solitude

In the wide pale sky,

I lay in a perfection of comfortable

thought

In a gently revolving cabbage field.

But my wife’s parents

Heading the search party

Discovered me there, and cried lamen-

tation and oxytones.

66

Be of good cheer, I said:

It is with me as with the great Flaubert

Who pernoctated in a cabbage patch

Noting down, for purpose of literature,

The tincture of moonshine

On the leaves of the vegetables.

Even so, I sacrifice myself for realism.

Tenderly they carried me in.

67

(A + B)²

MARRIAGE is the square of a

plus b

In other words

a² + b² + 2ab

Where 2ab (of course)

Are twins.

68

SECRET THOUGHTS

AND while my visitor prattled

I courteously nodded;

My eye was fast upon him,

My face bright with attention;

But inwardly I was saying:

“The excellent fellow, why does he tell

me all this?

What has this to do with me?

O Buddha, when will he depart?”

69

THE REALIST

THE sun shown on the meadow

And the painted silver patines on

the level river;

A purple bird spread scarlet wings

Under the trumpet vine arbor

And the scent of the pink melons was

in the balmy air.

But, down there by the waterside,

These colors gave me no comfort.

I was wondering

Whether an early morning bath

would ease my mahogony colored

spaniel

Of his plague of fleas.

70

OVERDUE

AN Irish acquaintance

Insists, with monotonous outcry,

That I have been bought

“With British gold.”

This is agreeable news,

But when

Do the payments begin?

71

ONEIROMANCY

YOU should never tell your dreams

If you wish them to come true”

My dear old great-aunt used to

say.

And now

Since Freud went into a second edition

I see she was ahead of her time.

72

MUTUAL ESTEEM

EVEN God

(A witty Frenchman has pointed

out)

Was not an original creator,

For He made man

In His own image.

That is why man

Spells Him with a capital.

73

APOCALYPSE

EDWARD BOK has related

That when he went to call

On Randolph Waldo Emerson in

his last years,

The old philosopher

Was noncomposed in his wits.

If so, it was probably because

He had a psychic vision

Of the long panorama of the L.H.J.

Stretching away into the future.

74

SUNK WITHOUT A TRACE

WE are well called brokers

For we are usually broke,

Cried the old financier on his

deathbed;

But the heirs all unsuspecting

Were out among the Grand Banks

Fishing for codicils.

75

IRRITATION OF THE OLD

MANDARIN

THERE was another reporter

(A young woman, this time)

Who came to my hotel to ask

whether

The Fine Art of Self-Salesmanship

Had made much progress in China?

I said, “Dear young Madam,

As regards ladies, our language has for

that Fine Art

An ugly word.

As regards Aggressive Business Men

I can only say,

Caveat Emptor.”

76

HE BROODS

STUDYING the life of the Ameri-

cans,

Its nervous haste,

It’s lack of privacy,

I said to myself:

Oysters are here

But, loving this volatile people,

And desiring their souls’ good,

When will cloisters

Come in season?

77

BIVALVES

THE pearl

Is a disease of the oyster.

A poem

Is a disease of the spirit

Caused by the irritation

Of a granule of Truth

Fallen into that soft grey bivalve

We call the mind.

78

ETERNITY AND THE TOOTH

IN regard to Eternity (said the Old

Mandarin)

I feel about it as I do about one of

my teeth.

Every now and then it gives me

A devil of a twinge,

And for a while

I groan and can think of naught else.

Then the anguish abates and I dismiss

it from my mind.

But I know, just the same,

That some day

I’ve got to go through with it.

79

A PROVERB

WE have a saying in China

That a man will wash his

hands cleaner for visitors

Than he will for the family.

Even so,

He who is full of sentensious wisdom in

Public

Maybe dark and doubtful within.

80

THE TOLERATOR

FROM time to time

I have laid my heart bare before

you

And you did not like it.

So I must point out to you

It is my heart, not yours.

My wrongness, perhaps,

Is dearer to me

Than your rightness.

Yet you must not think

That when I disagree with you

I dislike you.

On the contrary:

I love you for having ideas of your own.

I know how you came to have those

ideas,

And they are precious to you.

81

THE PAINTER

I TALKED with a young painter,

And as we came along Beekman

Street

My eye dwelt upon the shining audacity

Of the Woolworth Building.

But he was peering downward along the

curb

Where were clear pools of melted snow.

“See!” he cried,

“That’s how it ought to be painted!”

There, reflected in a long panel of water,

Sharp and exquisite, was the pale

tower—

Enriching every puddle in the neigh-

borhood.

True! I said—

beauty like the Medusa:

Look her in the face, and you run mad;

But, like Perseus,

Study her reflection in the polished

shield.

Look upon life in the mirror of some art

And, perhaps, you will stay sane.

82

THE POET

I TALKED with a poet

Who had just cashed a royalty check.

“In the past six months,” he boasted,

“They sold thirty copies.

I tell you, it warms the cockles

Of my right-hand trouser.”

83

ADJUSTMENT

In your Great City

I see, in jewelers’ windows,

Clocks that tell the guaranteed

Correct Time;

And in front of those clocks people

always halted

Adjusting their watches.

But suppose there were displayed, be-

side the street,

some great poem,

Telling of perfect Truth or Beauty,

How many passers

Would pause to adjust their minds?

84

ANTICRASTINATION

ON my way to your theatres, said

the dubious Old Mandarin,

I see To-morrow’s papers

On sale

At eight o’clock To-night,

So does your strange mad city

Leap hotly towards the Future,

Tossing aside each day before it is

finished,

Hungrily, fatuously, craving the next.

Is it possible that the Editor

Is dissatisfied with each and every of his

irreplaceable To-days

That he hurries To-morrow so close

upon its heels?

85

OH, INEQUITABLE BUILDINGS!

AND as for those who work on

lower Broadway,

What are they, poor hasty mice,

But cannon fodder?

86

TICK DOULOUREAUX

I AM wounded

In a fatal artery.

The vein of Time is cut,

The minutes are bleeding, bleeding

away.

Bartender, make me a tourniquet for

This hemorrhage

Or I shall tick to death.

Here Ends This Book of Translations

from the Chinese, Scrupulously De-

ciphered by Christopher Morley

from the original cordiscript,

and published by George H.

Doran Company in the

month of May, 1922.

And both publisher and

author invoke hand-

s o m e generous

blessing upon

anyone who

actually

buys

it.

FOREWARD

(or shall we call it an aside)

by:: Eric Bender

We all have dark periods in our lives. I was going thru a particularly dark period when a friend of mine, Dr. Ben Stafford of Daycare Franchise.com, gave me a copy of this book. I fell in love with an author... at least one of his works.

Ben is a collector of antique books. He has a wonderful private library. Words, lovingly vaccuum sealed in pouches. I have intended to digitize them and preserve them for all time. I took great pains to make sure each and every detail of his book was carefully preserved, twice. You see, my first copy was lost to a virus- and I didn't have a current backup- I thought. Some of those details were lost in this publication, but all the words are there and on their correct pages, altho they are all on one virtual sheet.

Ben told me that Christopher Morley was a freelance newspaper writer. He was paid by the word, so he held none back, usually. This work seems to be the opposite. he boiled down his observations in much the same way Sun Tsu did in the Tao te Ching. Neither author intended for their works to become a religion. Both, however are deserving of praise for a job well done!